Critical Synthetic Realism and the Future of African Philosophy after Postmodernism and Decoloniality: Reconstructing Universality, Epistemic Justice, and Intercultural Reason

Abstract

Leonard Ekene

The contemporary reconstruction of African philosophy confronts an unresolved problem: how can the historical and political situatedness of knowledge be acknowledged without converting the geography of its production into a criterion of truth? This article critically interprets Januarius Asongu’s Critical Synthetic Realism (CSR), locating it within debates over ethnophilosophy, conceptual decolonization, coloniality, hermeneutics, scientific realism, and intercultural rationality. It argues that the most defensible contribution of CSR is a distinction among mind-independent reality, the truth of propositions concerning reality, and historically situated practices of knowing. That distinction enables a critique of Eurocentric universalism without requiring the abandonment of cross-cultural standards of justification. Yet the article also identifies difficulties that any mature CSR must confront: the ontology of socially constituted objects, the underdetermination of rival interpretations, the normative grounds of epistemic justice, and the institutional conditions under which ostensibly universal inquiry is conducted. The proposed response is a fallibilist, socially reflexive realism in which universality functions as a revisable aspiration of inquiry rather than the property of any civilization. By developing objections from African philosophy, feminist standpoint epistemology, pragmatism, and critical social theory, the article clarifies both the promise and limits of a post-decolonial realism. It concludes that the future of African philosophy depends neither on intellectual separatism nor on assimilation to inherited metropolitan canons, but on equitable participation in the shared, unfinished work of philosophical criticism.

PDF